The Covid pandemic enters the ballot box: The impact of conspiracy theories on Italians' voting behaviour during the COVID-19 crisis

The spread of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020 was the impetus for an exogenous shock. In addition to the disruption brought on by the spread of COVID-19, conspiracy theories flourished on many aspects of the disease. However, the association between belief in conspiracy theories and voting behaviour has not been studied sufficiently, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper investigates the association between a belief in conspiracy theories and an intention to vote for populist parties (PPs). This association is analysed in a case study of Italian voters, where PPs can be found in the government and in the opposition. By conducting a cross-sectional analysis during the third wave of panel data fielded in December 2020, this article shows that individuals who have anti-vax attitudes and who also have a higher propensity to believe in conspiracy theories are more likely to vote for PPs, although it is worth considering the roles PPs play in either the government or in the opposition.

Pre-Service Geography Teachers’ Professional Competencies in Education for Sustainable Development

The professional competencies pre-service geography teachers acquire in university influence their contribution to education for sustainable development (ESD) in their future school careers. We assessed pre-service geography teachers’ (n = 100) competencies and attitudes towards the official, German ESD orientation framework to determine the specific need for higher education action. The results are a high competence assessment and even higher importance assigned to the ESD-related professional competencies. In the context of ESD, pre-service teachers are most confident in their content knowledge and social and personal competencies and least confident in their pedagogical knowledge. The cross-sectional analysis shows the perceived competence level rising with the semester number and a strong positive influence of the school practice module.

Keyness and Collocations of Therapeutic Rupture Types: A Pilot Study

This study was designed to examine the therapeutic alliance and specific rupture types that counselors experience in a counseling session by employing a cross sectional analysis of a linguistic corpus created from transcriptions of mock counseling sessions. A corpus linguistic program called #Lancsbox 6.0 was used to analyze the collocates of the top words found in therapeutic rupture types. Results of this study show that the word “just,” which was often used as part of a less direct filler expression, was the most frequent word in the confrontation rupture corpus as well as a top five word in the withdrawal and mixed rupture corpuses. Regarding the withdrawal rupture corpus, the node word “know,” a cognitive-oriented token that could create emotional distance, had four high intensity words (collocates), two of which (“I” and “you”) were shared with a confrontation type corpus. Regarding the mixed rupture corpus, the most common word “like” was often used as a preposition and was implicated in low empathy encounters and did not appear as a collocation in the confrontation or withdrawal rupture collocation analysis. Implications for both counseling and research are discussed.

Psycholinguistic Markers of Therapeutic Rupture Types

This study was designed to further understand rupture events that counselors encounter during a counseling session that ultimately impact the quality of the therapeutic alliance. We employed a cross-sectional analysis of a linguistic corpus created from mock counseling transcripts embedded in a website administered by a peer-reviewed expert in the psychology field and three video recorded sessions of Carl Rodgers, Fritz Pearls, and Albert Ellis. The content of the corpuses was analyzed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software. The results showed a significant difference between she/he words, or third-person singular pronouns, and certainty words when comparing withdrawal and mixed rupture corpuses with a confrontation rupture corpus. In addition, we found a significant differences between positive emotion words and discrepancy words when comparing a rupture-infused psychotherapy corpus to a general psychotherapy corpus. Several implications for counseling and research are provided in response to these findings. Keywords: corpus linguistics, therapeutic alliance, alliance rupture, rupture event, LIWC

Association of dietary patterns with obesity and metabolically healthy obesity phenotype in Chinese population: a cross-sectional analysis of China Multi-Ethnic Cohort Study

Metabolically healthy obesity (MHO) might be an alternative valuable target in obesity treatment. We aimed to assess whether alternative Mediterranean (aMED) diet and Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet were favorably associated with obesity and MHO phenotype in a Chinese Multi-Ethnic population. We conducted this cross-sectional analysis using the baseline data of the China Multi-Ethnic Cohort (CMEC) study that enrolled 99 556 participants from seven diverse ethnic groups. Participants with self-reported cardiometabolic diseases were excluded to eliminate possible reverse causality. Marginal structural logistic models were used to estimate the associations, with confounders determined by directed acyclic graph (DAG). Among 65 699 included participants, 11.2% were with obesity. MHO phenotype was present in 5.7% of total population and 52.7% of population with obesity. Compared with the lowest quintile, the highest quintile of DASH diet score had 23% decreased odds of obesity (OR = 0.77, 95% CI: 0.71-0.83, Ptrend <0.001), and 27% increased odds of MHO (OR = 1.27, 95% CI: 1.10-1.48, Ptrend =0.001) in population with obesity. However, aMED diet showed no obvious favorable associations. Further adjusting for BMI did not change the associations between diet scores and MHO. Results were robust to various sensitivity analyses. In conclusion, DASH diet rather than aMED diet is associated with reduced risk of obesity and presents BMI-independent metabolic benefits in this large population-based study. Recommendation for adhering to DASH diet may benefit the prevention of obesity and related metabolic disorders in Chinese population.